| | Editor's note: Veteran crew chief Larry McReynolds will provide a weekly column on ESPN.com, taking you inside the garage for Mike Skinner and the Lowe's No. 31 Chevrolet team.
If you had told me before the season that our best finish in the first five races would've been at Darlington, I would've said, "What tree did you fall out of?" Darlington has not been good to this race team, Mike Skinner, the whole package, for whatever reason. With Kevin Hamlin at the helm, now with Larry McReynolds at the helm.
It's been a long time since I ran good at Darlington. The last time I even came close to what I felt like being competitive at Darlington was the last race in '96 with Ernie Irvan. We seemingly had the two best cars that day with Dale Jarrett and Irvan until Ed Berrier's oil tank plug came out right in front of us and crashed us both in one whack. We were running first and second when that happened. It's a tough race track.
My hopes are, and what I feel is, that we learned a lot last weekend about
Darlington as a team and that Mike Skinner learned a lot about Darlington. Because if you told me to put some percentages, or numbers, as to what needs to make us better at Darlington, I think we need to gain 50 percent with our cars and Mike needs to gain 50 percent on his ability to get around that race track.
Race tracks where you drive it down into the car until your heart runs up in your throat, and you nail the gas as hard as you can to come off, we're successful at. Places where you drive it down into the corner only to a certain point and you have to wait on the car to take a set even though you want to get back to the throttle and then you apply the throttle like you got an egg under the pedal, as Richard Childress put it, that's the tracks that have thrown this race team the biggest curve balls. We're gaining on them but we still got a long ways to go.
Sunday was the first time I feel like we weren't getting passed left and right throughout the entire event. The only thing that I'm disappointed with is where we actually finished. It appeared as the day unfolded that we were maybe going to finish somewhere between 10th and 12th. But what happened, when we pitted on lap 204 or 205 and we went back racing at 211, was we made the decision that we were going to break that run in half and get every advantage of fresh tires that we could get.
We were going to break it down into 45-lap runs. What's the penalty for doing that? When you pit 'til everybody else pits, the caution flag can burn you. But we were willing to take that chance.
The race had a little bit of a green-flag look to it after it looked like it never was going to run any green laps at the beginning. But there toward the middle part and the end, it was like everybody was settled down and doing their own deal.
A lot of other people developed the same strategy. Of the top 16 cars on the lead lap, everybody pitted within a three-lap window, trying to get advantage of fresh tires as much as possible. But what happened was that I counted Mike down to when we were going to pit, and when I called him in, a lot of the other lead-lap cars hit pit road on the same lap. He saw Bobby Labonte's tire come apart, saw debris being scattered, so he decided to stay out another lap thinking there was a caution.
Not a bad-thinking structure, but the problem was he had already slowed down
and committed to pit road. When he decided not to pit, he gets back up to
speed so what happens? We go from 12 seconds in front of the leader to two
seconds behind him. It cost us a ton of race track time. Again, just trying
hard.
Like I told him, it's almost a deal where, if I say pit next lap and you haven't committed and see something like that happening, keep digging man. But if you've already slowed down, come to the apron of the race track, fixing to come on to pit road, you've already lost all that time anyhow, we need to go on and pit. It just cost us too much time.
We gotta keep getting better at these race tracks. You can't give those race
tracks up twice a year. It's hard to chase the championship doing that. It's
hard to chase a top points finish doing that. But Darlington's behind us. We've got to do what we've done every week -- sit down, write out the things we could have done different, and close the book on it, and get ready to
go to Bristol.
I told the guys in a team meeting Monday that we've got a pretty full plate
coming the next three weeks. Besides running the schedule of Bristol, Fort
Worth and Martinsville, we've got a wind tunnel test the first of next week
and the week after Texas we're going to Talladega to test for two days. We'
ve got a lot to do and we can't lose sight of those races but we've got to
get ready for this Talladega test.
When I look back at the weekend from the NASCAR side, they've done a pretty
good job at getting parity. When I looked at that scoreboard at the end of
the race, it was pretty scattered. There may be a lot of things that have been lopsided, but you look at it, and there are five different winners in five races. And I'll just almost bet you there will be a sixth different winner this week.
Hopefully, Mike Skinner's name will be in that sixth spot.
We've got some good races coming up. For Bristol and this race team, it's
almost been feast or famine. It's been a good top-10 finish or it's been
crashed and tore up, 30th or worse.
There's been no in-between there, but that's pretty normal for Bristol. It's going to be fast. The track record, no question, unless the race track really goes goofy or the weather goes goofy, is going to be blown all to pieces. I wouldn't be surprised, through virtue of what we've heard people testing, that somebody doesn't crack the 14-second bracket there and that's awfully fast around a five-eighths mile
race track.
Mike really gets into qualifying up there. The good sign that your driver
has qualified good at Bristol is when he comes off the race track and can't
quite tell you what his car did because he's still out of breath. We've
qualified good at Bristol and every time we do, that's been the
characteristic that Mike has had.
It's like "What did your car do." And he's like, "Wait a minute. I'll tell you in a second." Mike's bad to do that, but I think that's one place he really is out of breath because I've heard Mark Martin, Dale Jarrett, Rusty (Wallace), all these guys that qualify good at Bristol, be in the same way.
I know the last time we were there with Dale (Earnhardt), we didn't qualify
very good and I asked him what his car did. He said, "Larry, I don't know.
The car felt good." I said maybe that is what's wrong, because these guys
qualifying up front look like a wreck fixing to happen every corner and, they're completely out of breath when it's all said and done.
It's not impossible to win if you don't start up front, but it's hard win from the
backstretch at Bristol. And the entire race is just like qualifying now. Like we used to race everywhere, the drivers could run hard in the beginning of the race, kinda see how everybody was going to settle in, then race the track from lap
150 to lap 400 or 425, and then let's go race.
But now you've got all these young drivers who are racing every lap like they're qualifying -- and Bristol will be no exception. That's the reason why I think some of the people that used to race the tracks are in trouble right now because these
young guys are running every lap like it's the last lap they're going to
run in their life. That's one reason the competition is as tough as it is
today.
We're five races into the 2000 season and it's really flown by. That's one-seventh of the way. Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not. Mike's 19th in driver points and the 31 car is 20th in car-owner points. This time a year ago, I think we were sixth or seventh. So we're definitely behind schedule.
But we're less than 100 points out of 10th and less than 200 points out of fifth. Some of the teams that are in front of us, it makes me want to cry because I know we are so much stronger and such a better package than where those guys are at.
This may be a very ludicrous comment, but there's no reason, if the 3 car is third in points, that we shouldn't be fourth or fifth in points. They have the same race car, the same engine program, the same bodies, they have all the same ingredients including open books between each other, to be able to be right there with
them.
Obviously, the Atlanta deal was a curveball that nobody had any control over. That could be the difference between us sitting 19th right now in points and eighth to 10th in points. So there is a big variable there.
The thing about the Winston Cup point system is that it takes one week to go way
back, but it takes about two months to get back. It's just the way the point
system is structured. It's a good system but when you have an engine failure
or a very bad run like we had at Las Vegas or a crash, it takes six to eight
weeks to crawl back from that deficit.
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